The order looked safe: a 160 centimetre desk into a 240 centimetre alcove, 80 centimetres to spare. Then the monitor arm turned out to clamp on the back edge, which wants 12 centimetres of clearance to the wall. The chair wanted 90 centimetres of swing. The only power outlet was behind the filing cabinet on the far wall. Eighty centimetres of spare had become minus ten before anything was unpacked. Maker Stations has already covered why a desk setup should be visualised before anything is...

Yesterday was Grok 4.7 ( pelicans ) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro ( more pelicans ). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 , and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna . It's going to take a while to get a good read on all of these new models, but here are my impressions so far. GPT-6 Sol and Luna are half the price of their GPT-5.6 equivalents GPT-5.6 Luna was already my favorite model for building applications against, because it combined excellent performance wit...

I maintain and comaintain several open-source libraries. Some of them are widely used: ada parses URLs in Node.js, fast_float parses numbers in GCC’s standard library and in Chromium, simdjson parses JSON in Node.js, simdutf validates and transcodes Unicode in Node.js, and the Roaring bitmap libraries sit inside many database engines. These libraries are mature. They have been optimized for years, by me and by others. For a long time, their performance was flat. Not because nobody cared, but...

Raspberry Pi added a feature in their firmware that restricts users from swapping RAM chips , sometimes even RAM chips of the same capacity from other Raspberry Pi boards. Apparently there were people buying cheap 1 or 2 gig Pi 5s, soldering in some cheap and sometimes unreliable 8 gig RAM chips, and selling them as new 8 gig Pi 5s . Now I totally understand where Raspberry Pi's coming from. They don't wanna support Pis being sold like this, because flaky RAM and dodgy resellers are a...

Solitaire Alone Together I made a new game. It's called Solitaire Alone Together . It's Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet. Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/solitaire-alone-together Solitaire Alone Together I made a new game. It's called Solitaire Alone Together . It's Windows 98 solitaire, but you can play with everyone else on the internet. Read the full post on my blog! H...

Joint Indo-US discovery of water and hydroxyl across the Moon’s surface by the Chandrayaan 1 orbiter, prominently highlighted as blue and violet on this reflected infrared radiation map. Individual images: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Brown University / ISRO / TeamIndus | Graphic: Jatan Mehta 17 years ago this week, a paper published in Science announced the discovery of water on the Moon by India’s Chandrayaan 1 orbiter. Changing the notion of a bone-dry Moon as cemented during the Apoll...

Back in June, I gave a keynote at the “Identiverse” conference about app and website authentication with a focus on passkeys. The talk touched on values, useful developments and tips for websites and apps, and an interesting story about open, standards-based collaboration. It borrows some from my earlier talk at FIDO’s Authenticate conference, but it’s tighter and more fun. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to, give it a watch! YouTube Link Back in June, I gave a keynote...

Last winter I wrote a discrete event simulation framework in Python to keep myself busy, have something to put on my CV, experiment with LLM-assisted coding, and learn how async and await actually work. Over the summer, for similar reasons, I played around a bit with Lean and Gleam , thinking that I might translate the Software Design by Example books from JavaScript and Python into one or the other. Lean defeated me, and I quickly grew frustrated with the gaps in Gleam’s standa...

Got home around midnight. I have concussion and a couple stitches in my head, but nothing serious. Few other cuts and bruises too. By far the worst part is my back though - it's in spasm and REALLY painful. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Got home around midnight. I have ...

Clara and I found this Pentium III motherboard and a collection of parts off the side of the road in Chatswood back in 2024. I put it into an Antec case from my father in law, and it’s gradually become my primary utility PC. I use it to test hard drives and expansion cards before I put them into my other machines , and I use its 5.25 and 3.5 disk drives for imaging and creating boot disks. Weirdly, about a month ago the attached PS/2 started sending errant signals. Or so I thought. I’d ...

“I had the red shoes all along” loosely from The Wizard of Oz Introduction It is not that unusual today to find LLMs connected directly to an execution environment. In most cases, a considerable amount of research into APIs of the LLM service and the host execution environment is required to make this work. The following brief note and transcript of my session with Grok recount a surprisingly simple path to this union in the case of Livelymerge. It was achieved in less than an hour ...

Millions of Large-Language-Model -generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development . We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves). I’ve been in this game long enough to recognize tooling improvements from software companies at the bleeding e...

Here’s some Rust code: // define a function fn foo (x : i32 , y : i32 ) -> i32 { // body elided } // call it let z = foo ( 5 , 6 ); In programming language jargon, we call x and y parameters and 5 and 6 arguments . Rust does not have many fancy features related to parameters and arguments. But other languages do. For example, here’s a function in Ruby , another language I’ve written a ton of: # its definition in Rails def redirect_to (option...

Aviation came to Denver mainly in the form of mail. Like much of the inland West, the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights (both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s) and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers. Postal Service air mail contracts built many of the nation's major airlines—and its major airports. One of Denver's simple airstrips, Denver Municipal Airport, transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when Continental Airlines moved its headquarters t...

Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at AirBnB’s housing accelerator, rising steel prices, a resurgence of US coal power, low-head dams, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities Halina Bennet on what she’s learned from a year of covering housi...

“System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958 , but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a classifier to identify images of dogs, it can’t be used to tell you if a streetlight is red, or if a letter is urgent. Like a LLM, Jev can be prompted for a wide variety of tasks, from sorting email to playing Doom . I think models like this are going to be important. There are many tasks that a LLM could do in theory but ...

For more than fifteen years, LMFAO has been synonymous with party rocking. Today, we need to acknowledge the harm that party rocking has caused. When we released “Party Rock Anthem” in 2011, we believed that everybody wanted to have a good time, and that it was appropriate for us to make them do so. We understand now that this was a misguided assumption. Too often, we measured our success by how hard we had rocked the party without asking whether the party wished to be rocked, or whether e...

On February 28, 2026, a Shahed-type one-way attack drone struck a radome at Naval Support Activity Bahrain, headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. No fatalities were reported, but the strike demonstrated how a relatively inexpensive UAS can damage high-value military infrastructure. The attack also points to a broader challenge for counter-UAS teams, particularly in Ukraine and the Middle East. Adversaries are adapting their drones and tactics to make them harder to find and stop. One part of t...

0.0 Context setting Monday 21 September in Portland, Oregon, where it’s still unseasonably warm. I am also tired. Are you tired? It’s just tiring all over. I am also sore because I am 46 years old and yesterday went roller skating for the second time ever for at a kid birthday party. 0.1 How People Work, Live! Last Friday I had Anna Pickard on which was lovely because she’s the third person I’ve had on with an English accent. We got to talk about words and writing and how to sell ...

The twentieth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 20, I chat with Sara , the author of sarajoy.dev and whimsica11y.net , among other things, the importance of web accessibility, screen readers, and the joy of exploring and making things on the web. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. Sara sarajoy.dev The twentieth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out ...

Lately I've been playing classic World of Warcraft to get a feel for it and see if I like it before I try and go head-first into WoW Forever fairly blind with some friends. People have told me that World of Warcraft is good, but I haven't personally played it (or really any MMO outside of Final Fantasy 14). I've wanted to see for myself, so I dug in. I've been leveling an undead warlock and recently I've gotten my way to The Barrens. My goal was to kill some planestriders and collect...

The following conversation is fictional. --------------------------- ALICE: (Looking over a student's record.) Hmm, let's see. She wants to work in quantum computing. She's had the year-long quantum sequence in the physics department and has taken a course in quantum computing in the computer science department. She has done a project in quantum computing in an REU program.  Grades good, letters good. I think we should admit her. BOB: Wait! Did she get a minor in Physics? This is very important...

The past year has been exciting for w64devkit, which like any software distribution is never complete. Peter0x44 joined as co-maintainer, and has pushed the project in good, new directions, with ideas I would never have considered. Many of his improvements have gone back upstream, and so you may benefit even if you don’t use w64devkit. I’d like to touch on the various odds and ends from the past year. Release security In April I announced that release packaging is now signed . Today...